9/15/2016

Ivanka Trump Doesn't Seem to Have Met Her Father (Or Is Just as Big a Liar as Him)

Check this out. It's Donald Trump's child care reform plan, with a word find box up at the top:

The word being searched is "father," and it returns no results. Oh, sure, it talks all about empowering "parents" to help with child care, but, as others have pointed out, the only people who get any kind of barely-paid leave from work are mothers, mentioned 14 times.

The same goes on the campaign's fact sheet on the plan. Zero mentions of the word "father" and 20 of "mother" in a 4-page document on "Donald J. Trump's New Child Care Plan."

Trump has said in interviews that he didn't change his kids diapers. So, obviously, he has no idea what the role of a father can be other than going out into the world and cheating people so he can inflate his wallet and his ego. That's not an exaggeration. In a 2005 radio appearance, Trump said, "I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park." As far as Trump was concerned, men who did diaper duty were acting "like the wife." So, obviously, by his own admission, Trump believes that parental duties fall to the mother (or the mother and the nannies) and that a man who is anything other than an income-generating figurehead is not a man. Trump's the kind of prick dad who would say, "I'm babysitting" when he's watching his own kids.

Of course, there was no way his child care plan was gonna give two shits about fathers. As far as Trump's concerned, nothing comes out of a man's wherever so he doesn't have to worry about it. Trump's children, Ivanka, DJ, Lurch, the forgotten-chick-what's-er-name, and Prince Fancypants, have to know their Pop's view of who is in charge of the kiddos.

It was odd, then, that Trump's daughter Ivanka seemed to be tripped up at the idea that the child care and family leave plan that she championed was deliberately leaving out fathers. Interviewed in Cosmopolitan, Ivanka Trump didn't seem to know who her father was. Asked about a 2004 interview where Big Daddy said that pregnancy "is an inconvenience for a business," Ivanka got pissy about it: "So I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions, and I think my father has put forth a very comprehensive and really revolutionary plan to deal with a lot of issues. So I don't know how useful it is to spend too much time with you on this if you're going to make a comment like that." When the apologetic interviewer Prachi Gupta pressed a bit on its relevance, Ivanka went into full ignorance mode, saying, "Well, you said he made those comments. I don't know that he said those comments." And except for the fact that Trump is on video saying exactly those comments, Ivanka might have had a point.

More importantly, Ivanka Trump flat-out lied or was too stupid to know that Hillary Clinton has a child care plan. On Tuesday, Ivanka said, "There’s no policy on Hillary Clinton’s website pertaining to any of these issues, childcare, eldercare, or maternity leave or paternity leave for that matter. There’s no policy that’s been articulated on how to solve the problem.” That echoed her father's line that "my opponent has no child care plan." Which is totally true if you ignore the child care plan that has been on Clinton's website for months. It mentions "moms" and "dads."

But, you know, unlike Donald Trump's, the plan itself ain't a bunch of backwards-ass sexist bullshit designed to set women in the workplace back a few decades (presumably when America was great). It pays workers who take up to 12 weeks of leave for parenting or eldercare two-thirds of their salary, not the rate if they were on unemployment, as Trump's miserly plan does. And while Trump funds his plan with some fantasy about ending unemployment insurance fraud (which would end up costing a fuck of a lot to ferret out), Clinton makes it simple: higher taxes on wealthy people like her and Trump.

It doesn't matter anymore though. All of Trump's surrogates, from his obviously brain-damaged daughter to his obviously brain-damaged spokespeople, will claim that Clinton's plan is not a plan and only Trump's plan meets the definition of plan in the way that "plan" is defined in the Dictionary of Trump (where every definition is "Ask Donald"). It's just like Trump claiming he's a father when he didn't do jack shit as a father.

And none of his idiot hordes will bat an eye. Most of 'em will thank him for putting women back into their place. And when you tell the idiot hordes that, they'll say, "He hires women for top jobs," which is becoming the "I have a black friend" of sexist presidential candidates.